Mississippi’s only remaining abortion clinic may close

Mississippi’s state regulations are about to impact Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a lone abortion mill located in Jackson, Mississippi, minutes from the state capitol. Based on the result of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans’s decision, which will be based on arguments over a state law that mandates abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges, this one remaining Mississippi abortion clinic could very well be shut down in the near future.

Pastor David Lane of Pro-Life Mississippi said, “We’re hoping and we’re praying this thing closes. Mississippi will be first in something that’s good anyway, and that is no free-standing abortion mills. That’s what we’re after.”

Abortion clinics would love to operate with non-restrictive regulations, a modus operandi that has already proven to result in slaughterhouses like the one operated by convicted murderer/baby-killer Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

To prevent similar nightmares, Mississippi Republican Governor Phil Bryant recently signed into law a bill that bans abortion after 20 weeks of gestation. In addition, Bryant is forcefully pushing the 2012 law now before the court requiring that doctors who terminate unborn children for a living in Mississippi all be board-certified OB-GYNs and have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

Jackson Women’s clinic owner Diane Derzis argues that hospital admissions aren’t necessary because complications are rare. Nonetheless, if a patient should end up with sepsis like the late Christin Gilbert or she hemorrhages like the late Jennifer McKenna Morbelli, both of whom succumbed at the hands of butcher LeRoy Carhart, or should a patient have an adverse reaction to anesthesia, or a baby be breathing after a botched abortion, both the woman and the child would have a better chance of survival than the late Karnamaya Mongar, who died in Kermit Gosnell’s clinic along with three babies whom he murdered after they were born alive.

Governor Bryant had this to say:

We regulate restaurants [and] we regulate hotels for health and safety purposes. So certainly we ought to have the authority, and I believe we certainly do have the authority, to regulate a procedure such as an abortion.

At Jackson Women’s Health Organization, board-certified OB-GYN Dr. Willie Parker, associate medical director at Family Planning Associates in Chicago, is one of two abortionists trying to “Keep Choice Alive” by killing babies. So dedicated is Willie to the cause of abortion that he flies in from the Windy City a couple of times a month to perform abortions at the Mississippi clinic.

Parker is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging Mississippi’s law and has not been able to get admitting privileges at any of the 13 regional hospitals to which he applied. Parker believes that what he calls abusing the regulatory authority of the states, denying admitting privileges, and making access to abortion “so cumbersome as to be impractical even when it remains legal” is part of a scheme to undo the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Dr. Parker lamented being denied rights to admit patients to local hospitals:

Some we received no response from, but the ones that we did, they made reference to the fact that because the care we provide is related to abortion, they felt it might be disruptive to the internal politics, as well as the external politics, for the hospital.

Speaking at a 40th anniversary commemoration of the Roe v. Wade decision sponsored by Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, Dr. Parker shared how he rationalized his decision to become an abortion provider. He cited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan convinced the abortionist that it was immoral for him to refuse to offer abortions.

Parker said, “I grew uncomfortable not providing this care. I wanted to help those who so many others were unwilling to assist. Offering this necessary service since 2004 has given me my purpose in the world.”

Hopefully, at least in the state of Mississippi, Willie will be prevented from quelling his conscience with misappropriated Scripture verses and convincing himself he’s doing God’s work by killing babies.

Bebe Anderson is a lawyer with the New-York based Center for Reproductive Rights and is representing Parker. Bebe maintains that because there’s only one clinic in the state of Mississippi, the law, in effect, bans abortion. “Under the Supreme Court’s rulings, this law would definitely constitute what’s called an ‘undue burden’ because it would really block women’s access to safe, legal abortion throughout the state of Mississippi,” Anderson says. “Therefore it’s unconstitutional.”

Anderson also argues that what is happening in Jackson is “one example of the types of attacks that are happening all across the country to try to stop access to safe, legal, high-quality abortion services.”

Bebe’s skewed rationale is such that she believes that “[a]dmitting privileges requirements aren’t needed in order to protect women’s health and, in fact, are harmful to women’s health because they cause good abortion providers to be unable to provide the services.” In a recent interview Anderson pointed out, “And, as we’ve seen in Texas, they cause clinics to close.”

Bebe should explain her convoluted logic to the 400 women who have died since 1973 as a result of “safe, legal, high-quality abortion.”

Terri Herring, director of the Pro Life America Network, differs with Anderson and said, “I think it’s going to be hard for the court to decide that because Mississippi has one abortion clinic that it should be allowed to be unsafe.”

In the long run, the issue could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the high court, not Bebe Anderson, will decide whether the Mississippi law is or isn’t constitutional.